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The first round of applause for Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune was for Jacob Richmond’s extended orgasmic moan.

In an unorthodox twist, Terrance McNally’s play commences with a love-making session. In semi-darkness we see Frankie, a waitress, and Johnny, a short-order cook, enthusiastically dancing between the sheets in her Hell’s Kitchen flat. Richmond, as Johnny, concludes with a bestial utterance that earned amused handclaps from Thursday’s audience.

Afterwards both actors strolled around — as lovers do — in the buff. Certainly this isn’t your garden-variety romantic comedy.

Blue Bridge Repertory Theatre’s well-directed revival of this Broadway hit at the Roxy Theatre is cause for celebration. On opening night the well-cast duo of Richmond and Kelly Hobson, playing Frankie, offered nuanced and powerful performances.

McNally intended his salt-of-the-earth characters to be portrayed with grit and stout heart — these actors understand this and deliver.

Another reason to rejoice: now that provincial restrictions are relaxed, Blue Bridge is permitted to host its first full-theatre audiences since COVID-19 hit (previously only limited-capacity audiences were permitted). There’s unadulterated joy to be found in this return to normalcy. We, the audience, are reminded once again of the power and wonder of gathering together for live performance.

McNally’s two-hander debuted back in 1987 when the AIDS epidemic was raging. Back then, casual hook-ups were a dangerous thing. While AIDS isn’t specifically mentioned in Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, the characters’ unplanned love-making (following dinner and a movie) is overcast by this shadow. In our current pandemic age, when physical intimacy has the potential to be lethal, the spectre of death continues to colour our reading of the play.

(It’s worth bearing in mind, by the way, that the play takes its name from a traditional folk song about a woman who shoots her lover to death.)

Frankie and Johnny are ordinary 40-something folk who toil at a greasy spoon in Hell’s Kitchen, New York. Johnny’s the new hire — Frankie admits she was initially attracted by his attractive wrists. The play is about the single night they spend together.

Johnny, a diehard romantic, turns out to be an eccentric of Brobdingnagian proportions. He declares himself deeply in love with Frankie — despite not even knowing her last name — and refuses to leave. Frankie, not surprisingly, finds this a bit creepy. An ordinary gal, all she wants is for him to depart so she can watch TV and eat ice-cream.

In typical romantic comedy style they bicker before ultimately coming together as a couple (at the end Frankie and Johnny gaze at the moon while brushing their teeth).

There’s a strange, slightly surreal quality to their fractiousness. Johnny’s determination to convince Frankie she’s the love of his life seems obsessive, even a touch demented. When she brushes her hair he admiringly declares: “I put it up there with the Grand Canyon or a mother nursing her child.” She replies: “You know, you’re a very intense person.”

He’s undeniably an odd duck. When Frankie accidentally cuts her finger Johnny impulsively sucks it — a especially shocking act during the AIDS era. There’s an underlying desperation in his attempts to point out their similarities: They’re both originally from Allentown, Pennsylvania; both had mothers who left their lives when they were seven years old.

At the same time there’s something irresistibly pure and sincere about Johnny, who loves quoting Shakespeare and is determined to find beauty wherever he can.

Frankie’s the more ordinary one. She’s a high-school drop-out who gave up her dream of being an actor. Like Johnny she’s emotionally damaged — she greets his overtures with a defensiveness so angry and aggressive it seems positively feral. In an assured performance, Hobson captured this very well, managing to convey both Frankie’s toughness and her vulnerability — a tricky balance. We absolutely believe in this person.

Equally, we also believe in Johnny. Richmond has previously shown a talent for portraying dangerous misfits in such plays as True West, A Streetcar Named Desire and Long Day’s Journey into Night. With Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune he again delves deep into the heart of a peculiar character — not only with his delivery (here he offers a New-York-by-way-of-Allentown accent) but via a brooding physicality. His Johnny is no one-note character — passionate crescendos are contrasted with passages of murmuring and musing.

Credit goes to director Brian Richmond — Jacob Richmond’s father — who ensures Frankie and Johnny’s night-long conversation is made entertaining with shifts in tone and tempo.

Also notable: an off-stage cameo by radio broadcaster Barry Bowman as an all-night DJ and Hans Saefkow’s drably authentic set. Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune continues at the Roxy Theatre to Nov. 7.

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I’ve been hearing good things about Dael Orlandersmith’s Until the Flood. The drama is about the 2014 shooting death of Michael Brown, a young black man who lived in Ferguson, Missouri. The show continues at Langham Court Theatre to Nov. 7.